(courtesy BOOM! Studios)
SNAPSHOT
Alice first visited Wonderland as a child. Now grown up, it’s become her only escape from a cold, harsh world that feels even less real—a distant family, a tormented lover, and a father with secrets he’ll do anything to protect. But in order to return to her fantasy, Alice will need something much stronger than mushrooms. . .Cursed with a growing addiction, Alice is forced into the twisted underbelly of London and pulled ever further from reality. Is her obsession with Wonderland truly a respite, or a one-way ticket to the dreaded… ASYLUM?
Witness Wonderland brought to life as never before by superstar artist and writer Dan Panosian (An Unkindness of Ravens, Canary), artist Giorgio Spalletta (Red Sonja: Black, White, Red), and colorist Fabiana Mascolo, set against a vibrant but menacing Victorian London, as figures from Alice’s past adventures re-emerge in surprising new ways! (courtesy BOOM! Studios)
Sequels, prequels and story extensions are everywhere these days.
While many of them are fun and add some interesting elements to often longstanding classic stories, they don’t always succeed in wholly burnishing the series which they seek to build on and perpetuate.
Case in point is Alice Ever After, created by Dan Panosian, who wrote and contributed some artwork to the five-part series alongside Giorgio Spalletta, which, overall, is a fearlessly bold and wildly imaginative addition to Lewis Carroll’s weird and wonderful universe of stories.
In this iteration, Alice is much older and she’s back in Wonderland where she has deposed the cruelly autocratic Queen of Hearts and taken up the throne herself.
She remains friends with the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter, Caterpillar and all of the other characters we know and love, but hers is a fraught existence, an escapist life which seems to be tipping ever more into nightmare than dreamscape, much of that due, it is heavily suggested, by the fact that she is on some fairly heavy opioids, an addiction fuelled by Dr Morton Madsen and his sister Mistress Hulda, who are in prison for their crimes of supplying Alice with drugs.
Abandoned in the real world by her high-ranking dentist father and one of her sisters, Alice’s sole champion is her other sister Edith who works tirelessly to free her sister from fugue state and bring her back to the people who love her.
Well, the person who loves her anyway; it appears that her family, bar Edith, have consigned Alice to the dustbin of social opprobrium, and are more apt to scorn and condemn her than offer her assistance.
It is dark, very dark, and much of Alice Ever After taps into this vein of family dysfunction and drug-tainted escapism, and in many ways matches the original flavour of Carroll’s books which are certainly far darker in intent and execution that Disney would have you believe.
But Alice isn’t fairing that much better in Wonderland.
Her attempt to keep the Cheshire Cat at bay – he has been exiled but doesn’t appear to be heeding his state-sanctioned ostracism – is floundering and her madcap court seem more intent on indulging their ceaseless appetite for whimsical entertainment and quirky diversion than worrying about how it might affect their queen.
It’s as crazy and illogical as you’d expect, and in that respect, along with the darkness of tones in story and artwork, which is vibrantly and arrestingly alive even at its most serious, Alice Ever After absolutely delivers as a worthy addition to Carroll’s Wonderland canon.
The only great downside is how scattered the story feels at times, and how with only five issues to paraly the narrative into, it all feels a bit rushed and half-done.
There’s so much to like in Alice Ever After from the out-there ideas, the witty, meaning-laden dialogue and the filling in of various characters such as the White Rabbit, and the artwork is a thing of evocative and resonant beauty that captures the mood and feel of the series beautifully, but it feels like so much has been packed into the storyline that some intriguing threads aren’t followed properly and ideas not fully executed.
The ending too, seems rushed, and while there is a resolution of sorts, and a happy ending in a manner of speaking, it does feel like a headlong rush to the finish line that gets the story wrapped up but not in a way that feel as emotionally satisfying as it could have been.
Alice Ever After is hugely enjoyable, and if you love Wonderland, you will find much to enjoy in this clever add-on to carroll’s work, but for all of its imagination and robust storytelling and its focus on enlarging and growing the narrative and the characters who inhabit it, the series doesn’t completely hit the mark and you’re left feel impressed and awed but curiously unmoved which is a pity in a story so ripe with the possibility of making you feel something quite profound indeed.
(courtesy BOOM! Studios)